The Myspace Gig Scraper is a new tool to publish your Myspace gig listings on your website.
I’ve been struggling for quite a while with the problem of synchronising gig listings between websites, and Myspace has always been a sticking point – they don’t provide any easy way of getting the listings in or out of their system.
So I’ve created a small set of scripts that scrapes your Myspace gig listings and displays them on your site (you can see it working on the Little Fish site). You still have to input the gigs on Myspace, but at least you don’t have to duplicate your efforts.
The Myspace Gig Scraper is hosted on GitHub, which means that other muso-geeks can take it and improve it. It’s free for anyone to install on their server and tinker with, but you’ll need a little bit of technical knowledge to get it up and running. I’m hoping to make it easier in the future.
As promised in my last quick post, here are the videos we took when we supported Them Crooked Vultures (Dave Grohl’s supergroup) at the Albert Hall last week (if you’re in a hurry or you just want to see the Little Fish set (in front of a HUGE screen) jump to Part 4):
@Joff_Brown : Has fallen in love with the lead singer of little fish tonight. Oh and them crooked vultures were absolutely breathtaking. Dave grohl = king
It’s been a busy week. I played a load of gigs, and ended up on the BBC.
I got back from playing the Little Fish gig in Manchester at about 4:30am on Sunday, and by 2pm I was down in the Half Moon warming up for a Troubadour set as part of James Bell‘s rather excellent Offshoot festival. I revived 12×12 and played some of my more folksy numbers (Hugh F-W, Already Know, some of the Tweet Suite) before finishing with a particularly gruff rendition of How Come My Dog Don’t Bark When You Come Around, my favourite Dr John song.
The Twitter song on the BBC World Service
In the evening I was playing some piano with Jooles from Little Fish at the Holywell Music Rooms (another Offshoot event). As we were setting up I got a call from the lovely Chris Vallance asking if he could use the Twitter song for a BBC World Service piece. I’m still quite pleasantly surprised that people contact me about using the song in podcasts, radio shows, presentations and lessons.
Like a proud parent I’m glad that something I created has done well for itself, and like an errant child the Twitter song calls home every once in a while to let me know what it’s up to. So (like an unwanted and slightly braggy Christmas family newsletter) here’s the bit of World Service radio with the Twitter song on it. It’s less than five minutes, and worth a listen even if I wasn’t on it. ;)
Little Fish on the BBC home page
And as if that wasn’t enough, I ended up making an appearance on the BBC home page on Monday. A tiny, badly lit part of a video of me playing Hammond behind Juju and Nez, but an appearance nonetheless. It was a video that BBC took of Little Fish playing the Radiohead song Just at the Oxford gig last Saturday. It was a classic BBC mix (loads of vocal, everything else dry and flat), but they filmed it on three cameras and it looked pretty cool.
The video seems to have disappeared off the BBC Oxford site since it was on the front page, but I recorded it while it was up so I could always sneakily post it somewhere…
In a bizarre twist of fate I’ve ended up playing Hammond organ for Little Fish. This is a good thing. Little Fish rocks, I love playing the Hammond and I get to play the Royal Albert Hall.
The backstory is rather convoluted, so I’ll try to keep it short. It begins at the Zodiac in 2001…
I went to see the Roadworks Songwriters Tour at the Zodiac. There was a guy called Jont who was great and wore no shoes. I went to his monthly gig at the 12-Bar Club a few times and drank a lot of tequila.
Last year Jont put together a band he likes to call The Infinite Possibility (a 7-piece with bass, electric guitar, pedal steel, piano, backing vocals, percussion and my brother on drums) and we recorded an album, produced by Nigel of Bermondsey. A couple of weeks ago we were down at Rotator rehearsing for a final recording session (Jont wrote a new song that’s going on the album). JuJu from Little Fish turned up to sing some vocals on the new track. It turns out she had been looking for a Hammond player for almost a year, and I’m a Hammond player.
And now we’re supporting Them Crooked Vultures
It’s slightly insane. In a couple of weeks I’ll be sitting behind a beautiful Hammond XK-3 and staring wide-eyed past JuJu with her 50s Gibson and Nez with his immaculately tuned drum kit, into a 3-storey sea of Them Crooked Vultures fans. Not bad for a Monday night.
